Australian director Sophie Hyde's low-budget feature debut raises the question that inevitably springs to mind in the worthy presence of social realism. Why go out to hang around somebody else's kitchen sink, listening to their troubles, when you could spend an equally miserable couple of hours staying at home and dealing with your own?

Sixteen-year-old Billie's reluctant path to independence is accelerated when her mother reveals her plan to gender transition and their time together becomes limited to 52 Tuesday afternoons over the course of a year.

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Well, first up, the story that unfolds here is not exactly run-of-the-mill. At 16, Billie (Tilda Cobham-Hervey) is faced with her mother's decision to become a man. While she makes this transition, Billie is to go and live with her father but every Tuesday afternoon, by way of consolation, she and her mother will get together.

In stitching together this rather tricky story, Hyde raised the degree of difficulty another notch with some unusual rules. She filmed only on Tuesdays, using non-actors and treating the story sequentially. She and her co-writer, Matthew Cormack, also kept the script flexible enough to accommodate any insights that might emerge from the actors' performances.

Their reasons had much in common with those of Lars von Trier, Thomas Vinterberg and other pioneers of Denmark's no-frills Dogme movement during the 1990s. They were out to strip away the polished artificiality with which more commercial operators entice us into the cinema. They were after "authenticity", a word that crops up frequently in 52 Tuesdays.

Hyde is an accomplished documentary maker, as she demonstrated so eloquently in 2011 with Life in Movement (2011), the superb film that she and her partner, Bryan Mason, made about the dancer and choreographer Tanja Liedtke. And the observational skills of the documentary maker show up again here. More surprising is the level of intimacy she achieves with her untried cast and unorthodox modus operandi. The film has already impressed on the festival circuit, at Sundance and the Berlin Festival, where it scored two awards.

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Billie is not entirely shocked by her mother's news. She has always lived with the knowledge that she is gay. In fact, she's been her mother's confidante during some particularly rocky periods in her love life. What angers her now is her feeling that her mother is suddenly treating her as a child who must be protected from what's to come.

While Cobham-Hervey has never acted before, she's an experienced performer onstage and as an acrobat and aerialist in a circus. And what she carries off here is another form of high-wire act. She takes to the screen as if born for it and the insouciant tone she adopts in response to the twists that Billie's life is taking is more unsettling than any temper tantrum. With a noticeably manic edge to it, her playfulness can't quite hide the sense of outrage that is pulsing underneath.

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In comparison, Del Herbert-Jane's performance as her mother, who eventually takes James as a name, is so phlegmatic that it's hardly there. Herbert-Jane, who is trans-gender, was cast in the role after being hired initially as a consultant to the production, and for all Cobham-Hervey's vitality, the scenes between mother and daughter have a deadening lack of rhythm to them.

The intimacy I was talking about shows up when Billie is with the rest of the cast – her father Tom (a slightly bemused Beau Travis Williams), her delinquent young uncle Harry (Mario Spate), and Josh (Sam Althuizen) and Jasmine (Imogen Archer), two high school friends.

With these two, she experiments sexually, possibly trying to sort out her own identity and inclinations. This isn't spelt out. Nothing is. That's one of the film's strengths. You're left to find your own way into the story – as Hyde herself probably did while working out the best way to tell it. And it's slow going at times but there's a nice balance to it and in the bravado Billie adopts as she attempts to find a way into the future, there's something both poignant and strangely gallant. Better still, she's "authentic".